Digital Humanities: On Finding the Proper Balance between
Qualitative and Quantitative Ways of Doing Research in the Humanities

Abstract

Are we currently confusing being connected with communicating - and does the sort
of communication people are typically engaging in on the Internet, in social
media and when they use their mobile phones merely lead to superficial rather
than meaningful dialogue? If this is the case, it ought to concern Digital
Humanities (DH) scholars, many of whom continue to be more interested in how we
connect than in the substance and dialogue of that very connectedness. I would
like to argue for a better balance between the “how” and the
“what” of DH - for a qualitative turn of sorts away from
an interest in gaining and making accessible more information only, to an
interest in also making sense of and understanding that information. For such a
turn, computer scientists need input from the humanities whose specialty has
always been to turn information into knowledge by means of critical
interpretation and contextualization.

Are we currently confusing being connected with communicating - and does the sort of
communication people are typically engaging in on the Internet, in social media and
when they use their mobile phones merely lead to superficial rather than meaningful
dialogue?[Ramadan 2013] If this is the case, it ought to concern
Digital Humanities (DH) scholars, many of whom continue to be more interested in how
we connect than in the substance and dialogue of that very connectedness. I would
like to argue for a better balance between the “how” and the
“what” of DH - for a qualitative turn of sorts away from an
interest in gaining and making accessible more information only, to an
interest in also making sense of and understanding that information.
For such a turn, computer scientists need input from the humanities whose specialty
has always been to turn information into knowledge by means of critical
interpretation and contextualization.

The arguments made by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner
and Jeffrey Schnapp in Digital_Humanities (2012) may
serve as an illustration. For these authors, the core human values of DH are the
digital enfranchisement of the public and the promotion of a core curriculum for
undergraduates that will “make them active participants and
stakeholders in the creation and preservation of cultural materials.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 23] In terms of humanities scholarship Burdick, et al. hope that the constant
spread of information and knowledge across networks may give rise to “a state of ‘ubiquitous
scholarship,’ of ever-more interconnected, publicly engaged,
participant citizens.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 30] Again, the idea is to democratize, to reach out to broader publics and to
have the university scholar work together with the citizen or amateur scholar. The
“read-only” ethos of the old humanities should be replaced
with a “read/write/rewrite” ethos rooted in making - highlighting
“the processes of design and the
creation of the experiential, the social, and the communal.” Indeed, “authorship is design and design is
authorship.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 83] The kind of scholarship that this results in is “by definition, applied.” It is scholarship that
values the “how” over the “what” and that is
much closer to what the Greek poet Archilochus, and later also Isaiah Berlin,
referred to as “fox” knowledge rather than
“hedgehog” knowledge.[Burdick et al. 2012, 93, 57]

It is not, the authors of Digital_Humanities assure us,
that deep, specialized knowledge of the kind that humanities scholars used to be
fond of and excel at - hedgehog knowledge - is useless. It is just that “there can be little doubt that the
technologies that give rise to the Digital Humanities push us - scholars,
students, and citizens alike - into the fox family. The nature of discourse
and debate in networks, the reality of study in multimedia environments, and
the inexorable splintering of attention that multiple windows and channels
afford lead to pursuing ‘many ends’.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 97] If at all possible, we should not give up - at least not yet and not entirely
- on that “inner hedgehog” but instead try to create
“hedgefoxes”: hybrid creatures who combine the hedgehog’s
ability to go deep with the fox’s wide-ranging curiosity.[Burdick et al. 2012, 97–98]

The prevailing research culture of the
Digital Humanities will become entrepreneurial, much like design or certain
areas of contemporary engineering and the sciences are… The digital
humanist’s sense of identity will be less anchored in a discipline or
disciplinary specialty than in a sense of belonging to a community of
practice within which tools and methods are primary and objects of study
are secondary considerations.
[Burdick et al. 2012, 117] (my emphasis)

This sounds very much like a dismissal of the possibility described earlier of
creating hedgefoxes - of somehow also cherishing that part of humanities scholarship
which is based on the hedgehog’s ability to work long and hard and with intense
rigor on one particular topic. Are Burdick, et al. telling us, we cannot help
wondering at this point, that humanities scholarship will only be concerned with
process, form, design - in short, the “how” - after all? What
happened to the “what” - and what happened to those very central
questions asked a few pages earlier: “How can the Digital Humanities keep
the ways of the hedgehog alive in the era of the fox’s ascendance? How do we
inject deep digs into the free-ranging ways of networked
scholarship?”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 98]

To this reader, these last two questions posed by Burdick, et al. are the very
questions that Digital Humanities (DH) scholars ought to become more interested in
answering at the present moment. If none of the willingness to discuss the
“what” and to encourage hedgehog competences survives, then
the humanities and its scholars will stand in danger of losing core competences such
as engaging with “questions of value and
interpretation, with the realms of rhetoric as well as logic, with
subjective judgment alongside attention to verifiable truths.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 4] Seeking to be like the social sciences and the natural sciences by
appropriating quantifying methods and approaches will not make the humanities less,
but more obsolete.

In the following, it is the “what” that concerns me rather than
the “how” - scholarly arguments rather than concrete DH
practices. Though teaching and core curricula are - and should be - related to
scholarship in obvious ways, the pursuit of basic knowledge and cognition in
humanities research merits our attention in and of itself, it seems to me. The more
widespread the use of digital technology becomes, and the more humanities scholars
start working through as opposed to merely with computers, the more important it
becomes for us to look at the ways in which digital technologies transform knowledge
production and scholarly research.

Arguing for the need to find a better balance between the “how” of
the new digital methods and technologies and the “what” of older,
more traditional humanities methods, my article will be divided into three parts. I
will start by discussing the wish, expressed by some DH scholars, for a new, digital
Bildung. What does this Bildung consist of, how will it be propagated and what role will it
conceivably play in rethinking the humanities? The second part of the article
discusses the encounter between what C.P. Snow once called the “Two Cultures”: the arts and humanities on the one hand, and the natural
and technological sciences on the other. DH is one hybrid meeting point between the
two cultures and it is no coincidence that the “two
cultures” debate has since come to be echoed in various DH connections.
Part three concerns what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1962 referred to as the “mystique” of quantitative research: the
hegemonic drive of the quantitative approach. Questioning, a mere six months after
F.R. Leavis had delivered a vicious response to Snow’s “Two
Cultures” lecture, the assumption that quantitative research can handle
everything, Schlesinger essentially repeated Leavis’ main arguments.

I. The background: DH, digital Bildung and the
future of the humanities

As David M. Berry sees it, the time has now come for a third-wave Digital
Humanities. Neither the first- nor the second-wave DH, as they have been
described by e.g. Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp in their Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 from 2009, [1] squarely confronts the core expectations and views
typically held by humanities scholars - those “unspoken assumptions and
ontological foundations which support the ‘normal’
research that humanities scholars undertake on an everyday
basis,”
[Berry 2012, 4] according to Berry.

At the very center of Berry’s third-wave Digital Humanities is the notion of a
digital Bildung or computational
literacy. [2] This is a literacy which responds to what many have described as the
current “computational turn” and which not only understands
culture through digital technology, but also wishes to explore the cultural
dimension of computation. The classical kind of Bildung - the one we know from German Enlightenment thought which
involved the regulating force of philosophy and rational thinking in some form,
and which promised help in finding order and meaning in the shape of “the professor who tells you what
you should be looking up and the ‘three arguments in favour of
it’ and the ‘three arguments against
it’,”
[Berry 2012, 8] as Berry puts it - is no longer sufficient. In order to cope with the
digital onslaught of data and information to which we are subjected on a daily
basis today, we need a different kind of rationality: a computational
rationality which is directed toward neither the past nor the future, but
instead toward the here and now in an attempt to “
Jetztzeit-mediate,”
[Berry 2012, 9] Berry writes, using a term from Walter Benjamin.

What we are potentially looking at here, according to Berry, is nothing short of
a Kuhnian paradigm shift - a moment of “revolutionary science,” in the Kuhnian sense,
during which a new “normal
science” will emerge. Computer science and the reading and writing of
computer code play an especially poignant role in this paradigm shift, he
speculates - though not in the sense that “the existing methods
and practices of computer science become hegemonic”
[Berry 2012, 9], but rather in the sense that “a humanistic
understanding of technology could be developed, which also involves an
urgent inquiry into what is human about the computational
humanities or social sciences.”
[Berry 2012, 9]
[3] This is all the more urgent as it will most likely become more and more
difficult to tell the difference between man and machine - to identify the
requirement for what makes something human as opposed to mechanical.[Berry 2012, 9] If humanities scholars want the humanities to
play any kind of role in the new “normal science” currently emerging, this is the very moment to
become involved.

Berry’s recommendation that a humanistic approach concerning the reading and
writing of computer code be promoted is one that is shared by other DH scholars.
In Digital_Humanities, Anne Burdick, Johann
Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp promote what they
refer to as “Generative Humanities.”
Though they do not play with a possible third-wave DH, but more or less stay
within the framework suggested by the Digital Humanities
Manifesto 2.0, their stated goals are rather similar to Berry’s.
Topping that list of goals is the creation of a core curriculum for
undergraduates that is built around “fundamental activities”
such as curation, analysis, editing, and modeling. It is one that emphasizes
design, multimediality and the experiential, encourages process rather than
finished product, and views the creation of works of art as a communal process,
encompassing the combined efforts of authors, printers, typographers, layout
artists, and designers, among others.

The “humanist spirit” that will hopefully be the outcome of
teaching future humanities undergraduates to think with imagination and to then
translate that imagination into creative and innovative action is intimately
connected to “approaches that tolerate
relativism and diversity in thinking, orders of experience, and, yes,
fundamental values”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 25], according to Burdick, et al. Among these fundamental values is the
digital enfranchisement of the public - a wish to “at least posit, if not fully
enable, a future in which participation is possible for everyone,
anywhere, anytime. It would be as if it were possible to bring about a
public sphere in which no one was excluded. This is the core human value
of the Digital Humanities.”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 25] The authors openly acknowledge this wish as a “utopian
element” or “utopian impulse” - one that seems
similar to the old Enlightenment dream of access to knowledge and education for
everyone which inspired Robert Darnton and others to work over the past few
years toward the establishment of the Digital Public Library of America. [4]

One important part of this visionary digital enfranchisement discourse is its
association with technology and the digital more generally. [5] In an article published in the American Historical Review in 1998, U.S. Historian Roy
Rosenzweig maintained, for example, that the two most important contextual
frames into which to put the rise of digital computing were the Establishment
1960s of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and the 1960s as counter-culture and
antiwar movement. Both the “closed world” discourse of the
Cold War and the “open-world” discourse of the counterculture
had to be taken into account as discourses that helped shape the internet.
Understanding these dual origins would make it possible, also, “to better understand current
controversies over whether the Internet will be
‘open’ or ‘closed’
”
[Rosenzweig 1998, 1531], Rosenzweig argued.

Time has proven Rosenzweig right. Those controversies over the internet are still
very much with us; indeed, they have in some ways become more bitter as a result
of what has come to be known as “the copyright
wars” - the pitched battles over new technology, business models and
consumers, between those attempting to expand copyright protection and those
trying to circumvent it. But this only goes to show the importance of the
internet and of digital communication, and several historians have followed
Rosenzweig’s invitation to historicize and contextualize both. Some have been
especially interested in the “closed world” discourse [6] while others have
focused more on the “open world” discourse.

Historians focusing on the “open world” discourse have shown
how the computer quickly came to be considered a tool for global learning and
thereby helped shape the process of globalization and a growing consciousness of
the processes of global integration. [7] One example is Project
Gutenberg, founded in 1971, which was and still is “powered by ideas, ideals, and by
idealism”
[Hart 2004], as its founder Michael Hart once put it; “we want to provide as many eBooks in
as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many
languages as possible.”
[Hart 2004] Another is “Logo”, the first programming language written especially
for children, introduced by Seymour Papert as early as 1967. Logo became the
start of the program “One Laptop Per Child” whose Mission Statement reads:

To create educational opportunities for the
world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost,
low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for
collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to
this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn,
share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the
world and to a brighter future.

More recently, DH scholar Patrik Svensson has also emphasized the link between
visionary thinking and technological development (Svensson 2012, 65). Remarking
how the constant challenges waged at core approaches and methods add to the
sense of a field that is dynamic and constantly changing, he sees the truly
interdisciplinary nature of DH and the way in which it potentially operates
across all humanities disciplines as a big advantage when it comes to applying
for funding, national as well as international, where there may be a need for
Big Humanities to match Big Science projects. [Svensson 2012, 22–24]

Key words - for Svensson as for Burdick, et al., Berry and many other DH scholars
- are urgency and change; the need for rethinking and pushing against the
boundaries of existing and established structures and ways of thinking. Because
most of the work done within DH is collaborative and project-based and its
concrete outcome often is digital publications that do not fit easily into
traditional academic patterns of reward and support, moreover, many within the
DH community press for changes to accommodate their work. When we add to this
the sense that many humanities scholars have of competing for funding,
recognition and the place of their respective disciplines within higher
education, it is easy to understand how DH could become “a platform or means for
rethinking the humanities and higher education and a way of channeling
transformative sentiment that often goes far beyond the digital
humanities proper.”
[Svensson 2012, 32]

There is indeed much at stake for the humanities and for its students and
scholars, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick sums it up in Planned
Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
(2011): Whether or not we believe in those beautiful visions for a
transformative discourse in relation to DH, humanities scholars have to embrace
a new digital Bildung at this point. Otherwise, our
disciplines will simply cease to be relevant. The economic crisis has given
urgency to debates about the role of the humanities – again and again. From
fights over academic publishing to debates about what form academic writing
should take in the digital age, humanities scholars are faced with major
challenges. And the only thing that is certain, Fitzpatrick argues, is that if
we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to engage with the new media, we will
lose.[Fitzpatrick 2011]

II. Bridging the gap between the “two
cultures”?

It is interesting that at the core of the wish for digital enfranchisement of the
public we find a somewhat traditional (American) multicultural argument. As the
authors of Digital_Humanities see it, today’s
humanities curricula suffer from a gap between traditional methods of pedagogy
focusing on linear text and those of the multidimensional world of the Web and
the mediated culture in which we live today. Directed as they were at “inherited curricula, which were
rightly seen as constrained by issues of race, class, gender, and
first-world biases rooted in Eurocentric traditions”
[Burdick et al. 2012, 23], the culture wars and canon debates of the past thirty years were an
attempt to bridge that gap - an attempt that has unfortunately not been entirely
successful. The result has been that the humanities have come to be seen today
as out of touch with life outside the walls of the university. This has in turn
led to an attempt to move more students into vocational training in order that
higher education may be reserved for more elitist-minded students (Burdick, et
al. 2012, 23).

It was a different, though related, kind of gap that inspired F.R. Leavis to
engage in fierce dialogue with his Cambridge colleague C.P. Snow in the early
1960s: that between what the latter termed “the
Two Cultures”, the technological and natural sciences on the one hand
and the arts and humanities on the other. The interest in higher education was
one that Leavis shared with Burdick, et al. and other DH scholars, though - at
bottom, the famous “Two Cultures” debate
had everything to do with what ought to be the core curriculum of the
humanities. It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that echoes of the old debate
have found their way into the DH community. Indeed, from the very beginning,
Susan Hockey tells us in “The History of Humanities
Computing”, “humanities computing has had to
embrace
‘the two cultures’
, to bring the rigor and systematic unambiguous procedural
methodologies characteristic of the sciences to address problems within
the humanities that had hitherto been most often treated in a
serendipitous fashion”
([my emphasis].)

Humanities computing, which later developed into DH, has always been a visionary
discourse, as we saw. One such visionary attempt to use the digital as a means
of renegotiating the humanities and to rely on digital networks to further
interdisciplinary work is the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced
Collaboratory. More commonly known as HASTAC, it describes itself as,

A network of individuals and institutions inspired
the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn,
teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.
We are motivated by the conviction that the digital era provides rich
opportunities for informal and formal learning and for collaborative,
networked research that extends across traditional disciplines, across the
boundaries of academe and community, across the
“the two cultures”
of humanism and technology, across the divide of thinking versus
making, and across social strata and national borders. [My emphasis]

HASTAC wishes to provide a forum for, and thereby further, the interconnected and
interactive global nature of knowledge today – a forum that will blur sharp
distinctions between research, education and other activities and that will
extend DH beyond the humanities themselves to industry, cultural institutions
and the art world. The ultimate vision, though, is finding a way of bridging the
“two cultures” – defined here as not
only those of the humanities and the sciences/technology, but also those of
theory versus practice. What is interesting about the HASTAC statement is the
way in which it also includes a vision of bridging social divisions as well as
national borders digitally. Many of these elements were present in the debate on
“the two cultures” between C.P. Snow
and F.R. Leavis.

Sir Charles Percy Snow did a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge,
but it was as a novelist and government official that he became a well-known
figure to the English public. Between 1940 and 1970, he published eleven novels
that became known collectively as Strangers and
Brothers. These novels were very successful; they sold widely and
were translated into many different languages. Frank Raymond Leavis was less of
a public figure. Within the academic community, though, he was recognized as one
of the most influential figures in twentieth-century English literary criticism.
He did a Ph.D. in English at the University of Cambridge where he taught for
many years and was well known for his decisive and often provocative
judgments.

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution was
the Sir Robert Rede Lecture at Cambridge of 1959. In it Snow brought to public
attention what he considered to be a dangerous divide between the ethos and
practices of the sciences and those of the old humanities (especially Latin and
Greek). The British educational system had over-rewarded the latter at the
expense of scientific and engineering education with the result that people in
politics, administration, and industry were ill-equipped to manage the modern
scientific world. Snow’s lecture started a debate about the relative importance
for British culture and for the British educational system of “the two cultures” - a debate to which
Leavis contributed with his Richmond Lecture, entitled Two
Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow and delivered in Downing
College, Cambridge, in February 1962.

It is Leavis’ reaction to Snow’s lecture that concerns me here. Elsewhere, I have
written at greater length about both Snow’s and Leavis’ points of view [10] - arguing for a
better balance between the “how” and the
“what” of DH, as I am in this particular context, it is
especially Leavis’ view of things that is relevant because it was precisely the
“what” that also concerned Leavis, and that he kept
defending vis-à-vis Snow’s “Technologico-Benthamite” view of the world.[MacKillop 1995, 321] In and of himself, Snow did not matter
to Leavis; it is what he represented that was the problem. With all his clichés,
repetitions and sentimental banalities, Snow was too obvious, too lacking in
depth in the sense of questioning the received truths of the Zeitgeist, material but especially spiritual, Leavis thought. Snow
could not stop talking about “social hope” and he preached a
way of salvation that entailed “welfare” for all in terms of
material standards of living, advantages of technology and scientific
hygiene.

The dimension that Leavis most of all found lacking in Snow was the individual,
the human one. Though all human beings share certain common features - hunger
and thirst, for example, and the fact that we all have eyes, noses, legs and
arms - “individual lives cannot be
aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way.”
[Leavis 1962, 20] Spiritually, we are all different and it counts - or ought to count - how
each individual human being thinks and feels. Snow’s “social
hope” did not catch that inward quality of individual life, that
kind of existential thought and experience which might ultimately lead to
something as old-fashioned as wisdom. At one level, what was at stake was what
the Germans would call Weltschmerz - the tragic
feeling and creative probing into the big questions about life and death which
may at its best produce great art and literature:

In coming to terms with great
literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for - what
ultimately for? What do men live by - the questions work and tell at
what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling.
[Leavis 1962, 23]

At another level, the issue, as Leavis saw it, was the pace of life that modern
science and technology seemed to result in. Snow had kept stressing, in his Rede
Lecture, the urgency of his concerns, the speed with which today turns into
tomorrow - “we have very little time. So little
I dare not guess at it”
[Snow 1998, 51] - but he hadn’t really paused to consider the deeper implications of
this. Brakes must be applied sometimes, Leavis thought. It was not that Snow was
wrong in advocating improvements in scientific education and in living standards
for everyone; it was more that “such concern is not enough -
disastrously not enough.”
[Leavis 1962, 25] Things were changing so rapidly, and critical reflection was urgently
needed to help make sense of it all - and to prevent the worst scientific
blunders which, in the atomic day and age, could have fatal results. Moreover,
important ethical issues could well be at stake - issues that perhaps scientists
themselves would not be aware of:

The advance of science and
technology means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds, of
tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible
non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences, that
mankind - this is surely clear - will need to be in full intelligent
possession of its full humanity (and ‘possession’ here means, not
confident ownership of that which belongs to us - our
property, but a basic living deference towards that to which, opening as
it does into the unknown and itself unmeasurable, we know we belong). I
haven’t chosen to say that mankind will need all its traditional wisdom;
that might suggest a kind of conservatism that, so far as I am
concerned, is the enemy. What we need, and shall continue to need not
less, is something with the livingness of the deepest vital instinct; as
intelligence, a power - rooted, strong in experience, and supremely
human - of creative response to the new challenges of time; something
that is alien to either of Snow’s cultures.
[Leavis 1962, 25–26]

Intellectual depth and complexity along with a both critical and creative
response to change - or life, an essential concept to Leavis
because it was right at the core of what it means to be human - this is what
humanities scholars such as Leavis himself could help preserve. Without “the creation of the human world, including
language,” he argued, “the triumphant
erection of the scientific edifice would not have been possible.” The
word “language” is crucial here. To Leavis, language was not
just a means of communication; it was through language that meaning was created
- meaning which was then transmitted through literature as a “cultural community or consciousness.” The
place where this cultural consciousness might be sustained was the university,
and because language was central to thought and thought, past as well as
present, would be communicated via literature, the center of the university
ought to be “ vital English School,”
Leavis maintained:

Like Snow I look to the university.
Unlike Snow, I am concerned to make it really a university, something
(that is) more than a collocation of specialist departments - to make it
a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and
responsibility. And perhaps I have sufficiently indicated on what lines
I would justify my seeing the centre of a university in a vital English
School.
[Leavis 1962, 27, 28, 29]

Throughout his lecture, Leavis anxiously claimed that he was not himself a
Luddite, but that he would be dismissed by Snow and his cohort as being one, the
moment he pointed to the complexity of current technical and intellectual
developments. Any criticism voiced would be seen as inevitably “highbrow” - a negative term wielded against
anyone who attempted to work toward qualitative, rather than quantitative goals:

The upshot is that if you insist on
the need for any other kind of concern, entailing forethought, action
and provision, about the human future - any other kind of misgiving -
than that which talks in terms of productivity, material standards of
living, hygienic and technological progress, then you are a
Luddite.
[Leavis 1962, 30, 19]

Just as Snow personified for Leavis everything that was currently wrong, so
Leavis was for Snow in the end just another Luddite. Today, the name of each is
very much associated with the two cultures debate of which they were the main
protagonists. As we find ourselves in the middle of another technological
revolution - this time a digital one - we are once more very concerned with what
the implications will be for our research and our way of thinking and writing.
To what extent will the technologically savvy, already as fully converted to the
digital cause as Snow was to the scientific revolution, carry the day - and on
what terms? And to what extent will those of us who care about the humanities be
allowed to fret about the present state and future of our disciplines in the
same way that Leavis wondered about what can and should be done, without being
considered “highbrow,” elitist snobs?

III. The “mystique” of quantitative research

Snow’s lecture got an immediate response, both positive and negative, and he
later thought that this must be because he had touched on something which was
already “in the air”: “It was
clear that many people had been thinking on this assembly of topics. The
ideas were in the air… any of us could have produced a hubbub.” Apart
from the fact that these ideas were not all that original to him, what could be
inferred from this, Snow claimed, was that “there must be something in
them.”
[Snow 1998, 54–55]

Snow had a point. Whether or not people agreed with him - and Leavis and many
others obviously did not - he was on to something that greatly interested
people. In fact, there was a similar debate going on at the University of
Oxford. Here, Isaiah Berlin took the leading part in building a new graduate
college, Wolfson College, which would promote the powerful scientific and
technological developments of the time.[Hardy et al. 2009] And across the
Atlantic, famous historian and special assistant to President Kennedy between
1961 to 1963 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. gave a talk to the American Sociological
Association at its fifty-seventh annual meeting in August 1962 (a mere six
months after Leavis had reacted so strongly to Snow) in which he discussed what
he considered to be the hegemonic drive of the quantitative approach. This
particular annual meeting of the ASA being in honor of Paul Lazarsfeld, who was
considered by many to be one of the founders of modern empirical sociology,
Schlesinger had called his talk “The Humanist Looks at
Empirical Social Research”.[Schlesinger, Jr. 1962]

Insofar as empirical social
research can drive historians to criticize their assumptions, to expose
their premises, to tighten their logic, to pursue and respect their
facts, to restrain their rhetoric - in short, insofar as it gives them
an acute sense of the extraordinary precariousness of the historical
enterprise - it administers a wholly salutary shock to a somewhat
uncritical and even complacent discipline.
[Schlesinger, Jr. 1962, 768]

Having thus demonstrated that he had absolutely no quarrel with empirical social
research per se and that, as a historian, he felt indebted to sociologists such
as Lazarsfeld, Schlesinger then went on to clarify that the problem he wanted to
address concerned the way in which many sociologists had come to consider
empirical social research “not one of several
paths to social wisdom, but the central and in-fallible path.” Having
fallen under the spell of what Schlesinger thought could only be called “the mystique of empirical social research,”
these sociologists had increasingly come to understand empirical social research
as “above all, quantitative research - that is,
research which deals in quantifiable problems and yields numerical or
quasi-numerical conclusions.” He stressed once again that he did not
wish to be misunderstood; no historian could possibly “deny that quantitative research, complete with IBM cards and
computers, can make an important contribution to historical
understanding.” What he questioned was the assumption that such
quantitative research “can handle everything
which the humanist must take into account.” And perhaps worst of all,
Schlesinger argued, was the dismissal of everything non-quantifiable as being
irrelevant and un-important. What quantitative methods are not very good at
handling can in fact well be “the things that matter
most,”
[Schlesinger, Jr. 1962, 768–70] he speculated - and then ended by going beyond his own discipline to
conclude with a couple of paragraphs that concerned the humanities as a whole:

There is much, I would add,
which we must leave, whether we like it or not, not just to historians
but to poets, novelists, painters, musicians, philosophers, theologians,
even politicians, even saints - in short, to one form or another of
humanist. For an indefinite future, I suspect, humanism will continue to
yield truths about both individual and social experience which
quantitative social research by itself could never reach. Whether these
truths are inherently or merely temporarily inaccessible to the
quantitative method is a question which only experience can answer.

In the meantime, this humanist is bound to say that, as an aid to
the understanding of society and men, quantitative social research
is admirable and indispensable. As a guide to the significance of
problems, it is misleading when it exudes the assumption that only
problems susceptible to quantitative solutions are important. As a
means of explaining human or social behavior, it is powerful but
profoundly incomplete. As the source of a theory of human nature and
of the universe, it is but a new formulation of an ancient romantic
myth. [Schlesinger, Jr. 1962, 771]

Leavis would have agreed wholeheartedly. As Guy Ortolano has shown, it was not
the importance of science and technology that Leavis questioned, but rather the
complete endorsement by modern civilization of ideals such as description, logic
and clarity - to the exclusion of older, more qualitative ideals.[Ortolano 2005]
[Ortolano 2009]For neither Leavis nor Schlesinger, that is, was it
ever a question of science/technology versus the arts and humanities - but
instead a question of finding the right balance between quantifying and
qualitative ways of thinking. Both are important - and both offer us something
that we cannot do without.

It is precisely this insight - that we are not talking about an either/or, and
that we are and should not be engaged in trench warfare - which makes it
worthwhile to look at the old ‘two cultures’ debate. In its modern DH version, I
would suggest, this means realizing that both qualitative and quantitative ways
of doing research are needed - and that the furthering of a ‘humanist spirit’ or
new digital Bildung leads to our not
letting ourselves be pushed completely into quantitative ways of thinking by the
technologies that give rise to the DH. Instead, we should work toward developing
a humanistic understanding of technology, along the lines of what
Berry suggests.

IV. Concluding remarks

Viewed in an optimistic light, Bernhard Rieder and Theo Röhle correctly point
out, the great interest among humanities scholars for the digital media looks
like the emergence of a new and genuine trans-disciplinarity: “Digital humanities - an
endeavor at the forefront of crossing boundaries and research traditions
- would seem to bridge the gap between the ‘two cultures’
(Snow 1959), between the quantitative orientation of the natural
sciences and critical cultural discourses in the humanities”
([my emphasis].)

If we look more closely, however, we risk finding a wish to compete with the
natural sciences on their own turf by doing objective research, with the help of
machines, which aims to reduce as far as possible any kind of human, subjective
bias and/or emotion. Reminding us how, in the nineteenth century, the drive for
objectivity led to the belief in “mechanical objectivity,” and how this
very belief was fought tooth and nail up through the twentieth century by
humanists who wanted the role of human interpretation to be recognized, Rieder
and Röhle warn about what they call the lure of objectivity and, in relation to
that, the quest for universalism. To the lure of objectivity must be added the
power of visual evidence. While having previously often questioned scientific
images by raising the issue of representation and referentiality, humanities
scholars now increasingly use images in their own research - seemingly
furthering the view that numerical and visual reasoning is much more easily
acceptable as “evidence”
than is textual rhetoric which is considered by most scientists to be “argumentation” only [Rieder and Röhle 2012, 71–74].

Rieder and Röhle have no clear-cut answer to the challenges to what they, too,
consider to be a Kuhnian paradigm shift in favor of computer-based approaches.
“Could computerized research make more
traditional scholarship (look) obsolete,” they ask; “is there a danger of catering too much to short
attention spans while at the same time cruising on technology’s aura of
objectivity?” Being themselves all in favor of computer-based
approaches, they do advocate that humanities scholars get involved with and try
out the new computer-based methods. But they conclude their article by insisting
on a thoughtful and critical approach - one that raises inopportune questions
when the need arises:

In order to develop a
sensibility for the wider repercussions of methodological innovation, it
is crucial that we understand not only the potential but also the limits
of these new methods. Obviously, building research tools is not an end
in itself and in many areas there is an argument to be made for the
confident defense of methods that are based on principles other than
“persistent plotting.”
[Rieder and Röhle 2012, 78]

Like Rieder and Röhle, I think - and have in this article argued - that the many
new developments within DH must be discussed with a view not only to their
potential, but also to their limits. Whether or not it may properly be
classified as a Kuhnian paradigm shift - and the vote is still out on this - the
digital turn and the involvement with computer-based approaches will cause
substantial changes for both the teaching and the research in the humanities. A
number of humanities scholars have not yet understood the importance or, indeed,
the enormity of this turn - especially when it comes to their way of doing basic
research. Whereas a lot has been written on the impact on our teaching and
dissemination of knowledge in the humanities, not that many scholars have tried
to grapple with the impact on humanities research and recognition - with the
epistemological consequences of working through computers.

We are repeatedly told, by politicians, funding agencies and colleagues in other
parts of Academia, that if we want to stay vital, interesting and relevant we
need to “reformat” ourselves in the humanities. In the late
1950s and early 1960s, F.R. Leavis and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. perceived their
core humanities disciplines - literature and history, respectively - to be under
duress by the hegemonic drive of the quantitative approach, so highly
recommended by people such as C.P. Snow and Paul Lazarsfeld. This made them take
up and rephrase for their own time the age-old debate about “the two cultures.” Perhaps we should do something similar
today, as computer-based approaches force us to reexamine the relationships of
the “what” to the “how” within the
humanities. DH is one hybrid, contemporary meeting point between the two
cultures. In the DH, the two cultures literally overlap, thereby providing an
excellent case study for the future of the humanities.

Notes

[1]
The original Digital Humanities Manifesto was authored by Todd
Presner (UCLA) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University), for the Mellon
Seminars in Digital Humanities at UCLA. The 26 statements of the original
Digital Humanities Manifesto then evolved into the 50 positions of Version
2.0 from 2009 which is available at http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf (last
accessed on February 28, 2013). The quotations used in this paper are from
this document.

[2]
“In short, Bildung is still a key idea in the digital university,
not as a subject trained in a vocational fashion to perform
instrumental labour, nor as a subject skilled in a national literary
culture, but rather as a subject which can unify the information
that society is now producing at increasing rates, and which
understands new methods and practices of critical reading (code,
data visualisation, patterns, narrative) and is open to new methods
of pedagogy to facilitate it.”
[Berry 2012, 14–15]

[3] In How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary
Technogenesis, N. Katherine Hayles also speculates about a
paradigm shift “from linear temporal causality
to spatialized grids extending in all directions and incorporating
rich connections within themselves as well as cross-connections with
other grids.”
[Hayles 2012, 33]

[5] A number of
scholars have attempted to draw our attention to the fact that human beings
have always accumulated technology because it increases our opportunities,
individually as well as collectively. For some, this imposes a moral duty on
us to further technological development because we thereby increase the
options and opportunities for people around the world. See [Kelly 2010].

[6]
As historians concentrating on the “closed world”
discourse have pointed out, it was U.S. Cold War spending on military
projects that originally funded many of the most important post-World War
Two technological discoveries. With both an economic crisis going on and
support for deregulation growing, public funding for science and technology
started to drop in the late 1970s, though. One result was that the internet
was privatized and computers became a private, individual and commercial
project. See e.g. [Reynolds 2010].

[10] My
interest in the Snow-Leavis debate was raised while I was working on DH as
an Arcadia Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the fall of 2011. The
article that was my output as an Arcadia Fellow is available at http://arcadiaproject.lib.cam.ac.uk/docs/DigitalHumanities.pdf.
The following paragraphs build on this article.